Saturday, December 22, 2012

Call him 'He Who Talks About Self'

PRINCESS BARRY WAS HOPING TO JUST FOCUS ON HIS 2ND CORONATION. FOR PRINCESS BARRY THE FOCUS MUST ALWAYS BE ON HIM.

SO
WHEN HE DASHED OVER TO THE FUNERAL OF AN 88-YEAR-OLD MAN, HE THOUGHT HE
WAS DOING THE WORLD A FAVOR BY SHARING A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE LIFE OF
PRINCESS BARRY. IT DID NOT GO OVER WELL:

Someone needs to tell Barack Obama—it must get particularly confusing
this time of year—that his own birth is not Year One, the date around
which all other events are understood. His much-noted, self-referential
tic was on cringe-worthy display Friday when the president gave his
eulogy for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, who served in Congress for half a
century representing Obama’s birth state of Hawaii.

Obama likes to see events through the lens of his own life’s
chronology. Thus we learn that Inouye was elected to the Senate when
Obama was 2 years old. Now you could make this relevant by describing
how Inouye worked to send federal dollars (you don’t have to call it
“pork” at a funeral) to transform Hawaii’s roads and schools, for
example, so that the Hawaii Obama grew up in had the kind of facilities
people on the mainland had long taken for granted. But no, we simply
learn that Inouye was Obama’s senator until he left the state to go to
college—something apparently more momentous than anything Inouye did
during his decades in office.

After morning prayers,Kitabat reports,
protesters gathered in Falluja to protest the arrests and Nouri
al-Maliki. They chanted down with Nouri's brutality and, in a move that
won't change their minds, found themselves descended upon by Nouri's
forces who violently ended the protest. Before that, Al Mada reports, they were chanting that terrorism and Nouri are two sides of the same coin. Kitabat also reports
that demonstrations also took place in Tikrit, Samarra, Ramdia and just
outside Falluja with persons from various tribes choosing to block
the road connecting Anbar Province (Falluja is the capitol of Anbar)
with Baghdad. Across Iraq, there were calls for Nouri to release the
bodyguards of Minister of Finance Rafie al-Issawi. Alsumaria notes demonstrators in Samarra accused Nouri of attempting to start a sectarian war.

Iraq's
Finance Minister Rafei al-Essawi said Thursday that "a militia force"
raided his house, headquarters and ministry in Baghdad and kidnapped
150 people, and he holds the nation's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki,
responsible for their safety.

Members
of the al-Essawi's staff and guards were among those kidnapped from the
ministry Thursday, the finance minister said. He also said that his
computers and documents were searched at his house and headquarters. He
said the head of security was arrested Wednesday at a Baghdad checkpoint
for unknown reasons and that now the compound has no security.

Kitabat explains
that these raids took place in the Green Zone, were carried out by the
Iraqi military and that Nouri, yesterday evening, was insisting he knew
nothing about them. In another report, Tawfeeq quotes
al-Essawi stating, "My message to the prime minister: You are a man
who does not respect partnership at all, a man who does not respect the
law and the constitution, and I personally hold you fully responsible
for the safety of the kidnapped people." BBC News adds,
"Rafie al-Issawi, a prominent member of the al-Iraqiyya political bloc,
said about 150 of his bodyguards and staff members had been arrested on
Thursday." Nine in some reports, the Ministry of the Interior states 10. So al-Essawi's just a liar?

No.
What appears to have happened is what Nouri practices, it's disgusting
and it's illegal and the White House looks the other way every damn
time.

What
appears to have happened was that about 150 people were kidnapped. Of
those 150, 10 or so were arrested on charges of 'terrorism.' And the
rest?

They're
being held. They're being 'questioned' which, in Nouri's Iraq, means
they're being tortured. At least one of Tareq al-Hashemi's bodyguards
was tortured to death -- beaten so badly he had kidney failure. Two
women who were part of Tareq's office staff were held for weeks,
kidnapped and held for weeks, to get them to 'confess.' Nouri did the
same thing in October when he 'fired' (he didn't have that power) Sinan
al-Shabibi as Govenor of the Central Bank of Iraq. Suddenly,
al-Shabibi's staff was rounded up and 'detained.'

Since December, those working for Tareq al-Hashemi have been rounded up by Nouri's forces. At the end of January, Amnesty International was calling
for the Baghdad government "to reveal the whereabouts of two women
arrested earlier this month, apparently for their connection to the
country's vice-president. Rasha Nameer Jaafer al-Hussain and Bassima
Saleem Kiryakos were arrested by security forces at their homes on 1
January. Both women work in the media team of Iraqi Vice-President
Tareq al-Hashemi, who is wanted by the Iraqi authorities on
terrorism-related charges." Yesterday, al-Hashemi noted that his
bodyguard had died and stated that it appeared he had died as a result
of torture.

Alsumaria notes
Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi is calling for the international
community to call out the death of his bodyguard, Amer Sarbut Zeidan
al-Batawi, who died after being imprisoned for three months. al-Hashemi
has stated the man was tortured to death. The photo Alsumaria runs of
the man's legs (only the man's legs) appear to indicate he was tortured,
welts and bruises and scars. They also report
that the Baghdad Operations Command issued a statement today insisting
that they had not tortured al-Batawi and that he died of chronic renal.
They also insist that he was taken to the hospital for medical
treamtent on March 7th and died March 15th. Renal failure would be
kidney failure. And that's supposed to prove it wasn't torture?

If
you work for an outlet that just spits out what you are told and didn't
actually learn a profession, yes. Anyone with half a brain, however,
apparently that's half more than the average journalist possess today
knows to go to science. The Oxford Journal is scientific. This is from the Abstract for GH Malik, AR Reshi, MS Najar, A Ahmad and T Masood's "Further observations on acute renal failure following physical torture" from 1994:

Thirty-four
males aged 16–40 (mean 25) years in the period from August 1991 to
February 1993 presented in acute renal failure (ARF), 3–14 (mean 5) days
after they had been apprehended and allegedly tortured in Police
interrogation centres in Kashmir. All were beaten involving muscles of
the body, in addition 13 were beaten on soles, 11 were trampled over and
10 had received repeated electric shocks.

Out
of that group? 29 did live. Five died. I don't think the Baghdad
Command Operations created any space between them and the charge with
their announcement of renal failure as the cause of death. But, hey, I
went to college and studied real topics -- like the law and political
science and sociology and philosophy -- and got real degrees not
glorified versions of a general studies degree with the word
"journalism" slapped on it. So what do I know?

We
have to note that -- all of that -- because one of the worst outlets on
Iraq decided to 'report' today and they didn't get one damn fact
right. We'll get back to it.

Now
if Bully Boy Bush were in office currently, I would honestly cut him
some slack here because he can't call out Nouri for rounding up innocent
people, not after he ordered US troops to pick up the wives and mothers
of various supposed criminals, not after he ordered US troops to 'talk
tough' to these women, not after he ordered US troops to let them think
they would be raped and tortured if they did not talk. (As far as is
known, no woman was raped or tortured by US troops to give up
information on a family member. But many Iraqi women were threatened
and bullied into believing that would happen. There is a word for that:
"Terrorism.") So if Bully Boy Bush were still occupying the White
House, I'd understand why he couldn't call out actions so similar to
his own. But President Barack Obama is a different person -- one who
supposedly hasn't decided that the US government should demonstrate less
scruples than the mafia -- so I'm having a real hard time understanding
why the current White House can't call out these clear violations of
the law and of human rights.

We all need to grasp and acknowledge what's happening. AFP's quoting
Abdelsattar Bayraqdar ("Higher Judicial Council spokesman") stating
that the commander of the bodyguards has "confessed" -- these are forced
confessions. And it's past time that Nouri's screwed up 'justice'
system in Baghdad was called out. The judiciary does not issue
statements on guilt before any trial. They did that with Tareq
al-Hashemi as well (with multiple judges holding that press conference
and one 'objective' judge telling reporters present that Tareq had tried
to kill him). This is a joke but it's a sad one because Iraqis have to
live with this. It's yet another failure of the US government's war
on Iraq.

As a result of these actions, Al Mada reports,
Sahwa leader Ahmed Abu Risha has called for Nouri to apologize (and do
so within 24 hours) and to release the hostages. He floated the notion
that Nouri's refusal could relate in the international highway that
links Iraq to Jordan being cut off. Al Mada also notes
that a member of the Sadr bloc spoke to the media to note that this is
yet another political crisis, yet another one created by Nouri in his
six years in office, that the way this was carried out makes people lose
trust/faith in the government, that this seems to be an echo of the
divisions Nouri started last year with the targeting of Tareq
al-Hashemi, that the operation was unobjective and unprofessional and
that the lack of respect shown to Minister al-Issawi is a worry and
threat to all the political blocs. The article notes that Iraqiya
repeated their assertion from a few weeks back that Nouri creates
these crises to distract from his failure as head of state. That's not
all Iraqiya is doing. The Iraq Times reports
that they have formed two delegations. The one headed by Speaker of
Parliament Osama al-Nujaifi will go to Erbil and discuss this latest
crisis with various Kurdish officials including KRG President Massoud
Barzani. A second delegation (the head of which is not noted but is
most likely Saleh al-Mutlaq) will remain in Baghdad and meet with cleric
and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr and with the head of the Islamic
Supreme Council of Iraq Ammar al-Hakim.

Al Arabiya reports
he held a press conference today with Speaker of Parliament Osama
al-Nujaifi and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq standing by his
side as al-Issawi declared, "I call on the prime minister to resign,
because he did not behave like a man of state."

Rafei
al-Essawi is a Sunni. He is also a member of Iraqiya, the political
slate that came in first in the March 2010 parliamentary elections.
Nouri's State of Law came in second. Per the Constitution, Iraiqya
should have had first crack at forming a government and one of their
members named prime minister-designate. However, Barack Obama decided
-- the will of the Iraqi voters, democracy and the Iraqi Constitution be
damned -- he wanted Nouri to have a second term instead. From John
Barry's "'The Engame' Is A Well Researched, Highly Critical Look at U.S. Policy in Iraq" (Daily Beast):

Washington has little political and no military influence
over these developments [in Iraq]. As Michael Gordon and Bernard
Trainor charge in their ambitious new history of the Iraq war, The Endgame,
Obama's administration sacrificed political influence by failing in
2010 to insist that the results of Iraq's first proper election be
honored: "When the Obama administration acquiesced in the questionable
judicial opinion that prevented Ayad Allawi's bloc, after it had won the
most seats in 2010, from the first attempt at forming a new
government, it undermined the prospects, however slim, for a compromise
that might have led to a genuinely inclusive and cross-sectarian
government."